Flaws in taxonomy due to politics
I’ve been following the on-going saga of how virtual space (in this case the Internet) is shaping taxonomy in our lifetime. How “tagging” is becoming the new standard for categorization of information and, as a spill over, general human knowledge. I’ve watched this topic long before the recent news of Flickr and Technorati and delicious, but obviously it’s starting to become something much bigger than it was prior.
I believe my first “thought” of this was with an eCommerce site I was working on. The simple fact that a product could exist in 2 (or more) categories is something new since the advent of the Internet. With the Duey Decimal System, a book can only exist in 1 categorization. The reason? Well you’d have to literally have multiple copies of a book on multiple shelves in order to categorize things “correctly”. With virtual space these limitations are lifted. They call it messy categorization, because information is just thrown all over the place. But that ends up being a good thing in the end.
Well, I don’t want to reiterate what has already been said by people much smarter than I, however I can say that politics could end up playing a role in taxonomy today and in the future. As Dave Weinberger mentioned recently, politics has played a role in the past, which makes things much harder for us in the present to find the things we want to.
So, when/if you have the privilege to categorize/tag any information try not to be limited by your thoughts and ideas on a given topic. Try to categorize/tag things based on how you think others will look for it.
Oh, and why don’t I use tags on my blog? I will.
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